Acoustic, Power & Thermal Performance
Acoustic Performance
Given the system’s Intel stock cooler, I was expecting the small fan to ramp up quite significantly during CPU stress testing and run obnoxiously loud. This simply wasn’t the case and I was astounded to see the noise levels remain under 42 decibels. Perhaps the stock frequency helped because there wasn’t as much strain on the CPU.
Power Consumption
The highly efficient i5-6500 and Maxwell-based graphics card hardly use any power under load which reached an average value of 224.7 watts.
Thermal Performance
The CPU’s stock frequency and Skylake’s improved thermal dissipation means it’s relatively straightforward to attain good temperatures. Despite the basic cooling solution, the system never exceeded 60 degrees and remained well within thermal limitations. This exemplifies the notion that the stock cooler is more than adequate to cool a Skylake processor at default values. The reference GTX 970’s blower design cooler works rather well and kept the GPU core running under 80C.
